Abstract
Without named countries, conflicts, or characters, Wheat and the Old Republic is an effort to find resonance between the old and the young, humans and the land, and myriad conflicts across human history while following in the traditions of dystopian fiction and cautionary political novels. Told in alternating perspectives between a student, a professor, a woman, and a man, this novella begins when a professor and his student return to the site of his agrarian reeducation 30 years earlier. When the professor is reunited with the couple once charged with reforming him, the student seeks understanding of the war before her time and the people who survived it. Individual losses are brought into focus while the specificities of authoritarian regimes blur into recurring historical patterns. In these ways, Wheat and the Old Republic ruminates on the concept of the modern nation-state, the anachronistic systems that shape it, and the people who make their lives within it.